With just a few working days left before I close up shop for the year, I wanted to take a brief moment to look back over the past 12 months. From a professional perspective, it’s been a very eventful year, and I’m left with lots of food for thought heading into 2018. Below, I reflect a little on some of these developments.
Having built up a solid base of regular clients in the preceding years, I began 2017 with the plan to focus on honing my skills: so that I could feel more confident in my ability to deliver good work, so that I could create future opportunities for myself in more specialist fields and so that I could futureproof myself against the looming threat of machine translation.
To that end, I completed further proofreading training with the SfEP (and have now also begun their mentoring programme) and translation mentoring, as well as attending a BDÜ seminar on academic translation. I also went to my first two larger-scale translation events: the Elia Together conference in Berlin (where I was one of the speakers) and the ITI Conference (which was held five minutes’ walk away from my own home in Cardiff and which I’m surprised to see I didn’t blog about). There were also a few smaller events, such as the Anglophoner Tag and ITI Cymru Wales’s 5th anniversary celebration (where I participated in my very first translation slam). I’ve also sought out more opportunities to learn directly from other translators: for example, via Lieblingsärgernisse: Pet Peeves in DE<>EN Translation, a very helpful Facebook group that was set up this year where translators discuss ways of approaching notoriously tricky words. Finally, I’ve set up a small programme with other local German–English translators where we regularly exchange short translated texts and provide feedback on each other’s work (something I plan to write about in more detail in future).
As varied as these experiences were, and for all that, taken individually, they didn’t always seem to teach me much I didn’t already know, taken together they have cumulatively brought about a shift of perspective: a clearer sense of what a good translation looks like, of what standards my work should meet, of how I should understand my role. I’ve seen many more examples of outstanding work by others in the industry, and come to appreciate the difference it makes (both as a translator and editor/proofreader) to have specialist, in-depth knowledge.
The challenge, however, is to bridge the gap between this sense of the standards I wish to attain, and my day-to-day working reality. I hope I am a better translator and proofreader than I was 12 months ago, and I’ve certainly completed work during this year which I feel proud of and have received glowing feedback on. But at the same time, I’ve also had more experiences of feeling dissatisfied with work I’ve previously produced. And I’ve increasingly found that meeting a standard I feel happy with or improving on earlier work has required spending much more time than I used to, which isn’t always ideal in a world of tight deadlines where time is money. And in any case, the equation isn’t necessarily as simple as the more time and effort you invest, the better the quality; it is possible to overthink and lose a certain freshness or spontaneity, to direct time and energy into the wrong things or in the wrong ways, to give yourself a false sense that you have been extra thorough. So although working to improve my skills has been rewarding, it has also at times been quite a demanding process. Learning to strike the right balance is a work in progress.
Something I didn’t anticipate is that 2017 has also been, at points, a little physically gruelling too. In February, years of carelessness finally caught up with me and I developed symptoms of repetitive strain injury from typing, with pain in my arms, hands and shoulders. As a result, I’ve begun using Dragon voice recognition software. Although I’ve generally been impressed with how intuitive and reliable it is, I’m not an especially enthusiastic convert, as I’ve found it hard to settle into a comfortable workflow with it.
To my own surprise, between the physical difficulties I’ve had with typing and the challenge of improving quality without excessively slowing down the speed at which I am able to complete work, I’ve recently become tentatively interested in the possibilities of using machine translation in aspects of my work. In theory, it could alleviate some of the physical strain as well as some of the more laborious and mechanical aspects of the translation process, freeing me up to concentrate solely on the more creative and cognitive aspects that I now find taking up an increasing amount of time in my work. Seen this way, machine translation could be not simply a threat taking away translators’ jobs, but rather a tool, an alternative to Dragon or keyboards for inputting words that would have the advantage of cutting out certain categories of error. (For a more detailed discussion, see this recent post by my colleague Elisabeth Hippe-Heisler.) In practice, where I’ve experimented with machine translation tools (on non-confidential texts), the results so far haven’t been satisfying, despite the hype; time and quality gains have been minimal to non-existent thanks to the amount of editing required and the difficulty of getting beneath the skin of a source text you haven’t directly translated and a target text you haven’t directly written. Still, I’m sure machine translation is a theme that isn’t going to go away, and in future I am more open to exploring the possibilities it might open up.
That will have to wait till next year though, as for the next few weeks I will be enjoying a well-earned break. I hope you too have a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year!
To that end, I completed further proofreading training with the SfEP (and have now also begun their mentoring programme) and translation mentoring, as well as attending a BDÜ seminar on academic translation. I also went to my first two larger-scale translation events: the Elia Together conference in Berlin (where I was one of the speakers) and the ITI Conference (which was held five minutes’ walk away from my own home in Cardiff and which I’m surprised to see I didn’t blog about). There were also a few smaller events, such as the Anglophoner Tag and ITI Cymru Wales’s 5th anniversary celebration (where I participated in my very first translation slam). I’ve also sought out more opportunities to learn directly from other translators: for example, via Lieblingsärgernisse: Pet Peeves in DE<>EN Translation, a very helpful Facebook group that was set up this year where translators discuss ways of approaching notoriously tricky words. Finally, I’ve set up a small programme with other local German–English translators where we regularly exchange short translated texts and provide feedback on each other’s work (something I plan to write about in more detail in future).
As varied as these experiences were, and for all that, taken individually, they didn’t always seem to teach me much I didn’t already know, taken together they have cumulatively brought about a shift of perspective: a clearer sense of what a good translation looks like, of what standards my work should meet, of how I should understand my role. I’ve seen many more examples of outstanding work by others in the industry, and come to appreciate the difference it makes (both as a translator and editor/proofreader) to have specialist, in-depth knowledge.
The challenge, however, is to bridge the gap between this sense of the standards I wish to attain, and my day-to-day working reality. I hope I am a better translator and proofreader than I was 12 months ago, and I’ve certainly completed work during this year which I feel proud of and have received glowing feedback on. But at the same time, I’ve also had more experiences of feeling dissatisfied with work I’ve previously produced. And I’ve increasingly found that meeting a standard I feel happy with or improving on earlier work has required spending much more time than I used to, which isn’t always ideal in a world of tight deadlines where time is money. And in any case, the equation isn’t necessarily as simple as the more time and effort you invest, the better the quality; it is possible to overthink and lose a certain freshness or spontaneity, to direct time and energy into the wrong things or in the wrong ways, to give yourself a false sense that you have been extra thorough. So although working to improve my skills has been rewarding, it has also at times been quite a demanding process. Learning to strike the right balance is a work in progress.
Something I didn’t anticipate is that 2017 has also been, at points, a little physically gruelling too. In February, years of carelessness finally caught up with me and I developed symptoms of repetitive strain injury from typing, with pain in my arms, hands and shoulders. As a result, I’ve begun using Dragon voice recognition software. Although I’ve generally been impressed with how intuitive and reliable it is, I’m not an especially enthusiastic convert, as I’ve found it hard to settle into a comfortable workflow with it.
To my own surprise, between the physical difficulties I’ve had with typing and the challenge of improving quality without excessively slowing down the speed at which I am able to complete work, I’ve recently become tentatively interested in the possibilities of using machine translation in aspects of my work. In theory, it could alleviate some of the physical strain as well as some of the more laborious and mechanical aspects of the translation process, freeing me up to concentrate solely on the more creative and cognitive aspects that I now find taking up an increasing amount of time in my work. Seen this way, machine translation could be not simply a threat taking away translators’ jobs, but rather a tool, an alternative to Dragon or keyboards for inputting words that would have the advantage of cutting out certain categories of error. (For a more detailed discussion, see this recent post by my colleague Elisabeth Hippe-Heisler.) In practice, where I’ve experimented with machine translation tools (on non-confidential texts), the results so far haven’t been satisfying, despite the hype; time and quality gains have been minimal to non-existent thanks to the amount of editing required and the difficulty of getting beneath the skin of a source text you haven’t directly translated and a target text you haven’t directly written. Still, I’m sure machine translation is a theme that isn’t going to go away, and in future I am more open to exploring the possibilities it might open up.
That will have to wait till next year though, as for the next few weeks I will be enjoying a well-earned break. I hope you too have a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year!
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